The Thursday ThesisThoughts and Lessons from Life & Guitar Teaching

The Thursday Thesis - 22/09/2016

The Chemistry of Smiles.

The mile-wide smile on Antonio’s face told me that he was genuinely delighted to scan my basket of fresh vegetables.Working on the checkout at Tesco isn’t a glamorous job by most people’s standards, yet this guy just oozes happiness from a face that is deeply grooved and sculpted by the habit of laughter.

The saying goes "By the time you are forty, you have the body and face that you deserve".Your face announces to the world who you have been.

Antonio’s smile is the happy and handsome side-effect of his habit of finding some small delight in anything, even scanning groceries.

How does this work?Simple, the muscles and soft tissues of your face will adapt themselves to produce your most-used expressions with the least amount of effort, just like any other body-part adapts to routine tasks.

Now it’s a well known fact that smiling releases brain chemicals called endorphins - short for “endogenous morphines” – a natural painkiller which also lowers blood pressure and boosts your immune system.

The best thing is that any smile releases endorphins and sets in motion your hormone merry-go-round: even a forced smile. Regardless of the cause, your smile releases endorphins, and that makes you feel good, which makes you smile more, and so on.

It’s also been proven that frowning, or being around people who frown, produces the stress hormone cortisol – a contributory factor in obesity, high blood pressure, lowered immunity and insomnia.Frown, and you release a whiff of cortisol into your system, lowering your sense of well-being and bringing you down, quietly slipping your hormone merry-go-round into reverse.

Did you notice that you can control the direction of spin?

Yes, whether you like it or not, you are already on one of the horses, and you have to ride it. But you do get to choose the direction in which the merry-go-round spins - it is always going to be your choice.

So, if you see somebody without a smile – give ‘em one of yours!Smiles are free, and you can always make more of them.

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It's Like This...

The Thursday Thesis is a fun way to share ideas and experiences from life as a Guitar Teacher, Certified NLP Practitioner and Life-Coach, Retailer, Composer, Player, Technician, Accountant, Scientist and Writer... and as the father of a wonderful son.

I'm Neil Cowmeadow, the Guitar Teacher and Guitar Technician, based near Telford, Shropshire.

My aim is to share some of the discoveries and cool stuff that took me a lifetime to learn - so you don't have to replicate the effort.

Along the way, I'm also going to debunk the mountains of nonsense and pretentious claptrap that put people off playing music, writing songs, and having more fun in their lives.

Along the way, some of these posts might challenge your assumptions and ideas.Pick up a nugget of cool stuff, here, and throw it into the waters of your life.The ripples you'll create will spread outwards...

I may also wander off into politics, literature, or any other place I damn-well please, but if you're cool with that, read on....